If you’ve ever had to work with more than one currency in an application, you know how painful and annoying it can be. Providing reasonable rates of exchange, keeping track of payments in one currency against expenses in another — it’s ugly. It’s not even worth it. So, we’re throwing it out.

That’s right; we’re putting your money in the Cloud.

Introducing the FreshBuck

We looked at other alternative currencies, but what they’re all really missing is a solid sense of the value behind them. What can you really exchange these units FOR? It’s a problem nobody has really cracked yet.

Until now. We can tell you exactly what your FreshBuck is worth: six seconds of free FreshBooks time. That’s right — for only ƒ10 you get a whole minute of FreshBooks. ƒ144,400 equals a whole DAY of FreshBooks in your pocket.

Time really IS money with FreshBucks!

Security

Of course running our own currency will require massive security. We need to be sure that no one can forge FreshBucks. Every single transaction record is signed using the finest, hand-crafted elliptic curve digital signatures, and stored in perpetuity right here on our servers. While other projects worry about avoiding a single, central trusted source, we’re perfectly happy to act as the trusted party in transactions all over the globe. Plainly, nothing could possibly go wrong.

Cloud Currency offers all the benefits of cloud computing, but for money. It’s just like the money you know and love, but instead of storing them in your own wallet, now you can store your money on someone else’s computer. No need to worry about burglary and fraud: we’ll deal with all of that for you, honest.

The Maple Secret

But that’s not all. In order to deliver a truly reliable currency for the 21st century we also need to be sure that this new currency is backed by enough hard specie. In our history, the most trusted currencies have all been backed by real resources: from shells and peppercorns through to the gold and silver-backed currencies for prior centuries.

We want to return to an era of truly trustworthy currency. We also wanted to build a gigantic underground vault. FreshBooks has recently, rather fortunately, taken possession of a very large quantity of maple syrup, from a private source that must remain nameless. So, we’re bootstrapping FreshBucks with just over six million gallons of maple syrup — 23 million litres, for our international colleagues.

Today we introduce the world’s first maple-backed currency. Who doesn’t love maple syrup? Accepted by all and the first step towards rejecting the complicated mix of unsubstantiated currencies run by central bankers, and utterly untrusted currencies run by people who can do very complicated sums very quickly. Time will tell who has the more solid economic outlook.